Saturday, October 29, 2011

Do you like sea glass? I do! Sea glass is glass that is tossed in sand, water, and rocks. Afterwards it is "frosted" and not sharp. To cheat and make sea glass, put glass in a tumbler or put some rocks and glass in a mesh bag and tow behind your boat. Orange sea glass is the most rare color. The chance of finding an orange piece is 1 in 10,000.Purple sea glass is rare too, the chances of finding one is 1 in 300. Old purple glass has manganese in it. It started out clear but the manganese in it makes it turn purple in the sun. Purple is one of the most desired of sea glass colors. I didn't know all the history behind purple sea glass when I reached for a 80 year old amethyst piece of glass on a beach in East Greenwich, RI. I was talking to some cruisers, that knew alot about sea glass, and I showed them some of my collection. When they saw the purple one, they freaked out! When I heard the story behind it and how valuable it was, I was proud. Sea glass comes in many other beautiful colors including pink, black, green, brown, blue, and many more, so start collecting today!
Here are some of my favorite pieces.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

I'm blogging here from Tangier Island, Virginia. Tangier is a beautiful island floating 14 miles off the coast of Virginia. Tangier is slowly sinking due to erosion. There are a lot of golf carts and electric scooters on the island because the roads are too small for cars. However we saw 1 small "Police" car. We went to a little museum that has an old stove in it that the dock master used back in the thirties. There was a lot of interesting things on Tangier, here are a few.

Do you think you've seen a lot of cats, like 4 or 5 in 1 house? Well you obviously haven't been to Tangier. Tangier has sooooooo many cats. Almost everyone on the island has at least 5 cats and Mr. Parks, the dock master, even has 26! He says that you get a free night for every cat you take and whenever we pass his house to get to our dock a parade of 20 kitties greets us. I really like one that I call Tangerine. She always hangs out on the dock "guarding" our boat. She even got on Borealis once! She always stands out in a crowd of her black buddies because she is a tortoise shell. That's all I know about the cats on Tangier, but read on to learn about the visit to the beach.

The beach on Tangier was amazing! It was sandy, white, and beautiful. Remi and I dragged logs around, when we finally found the right place, we built a hut. We weaved grass and used that as floors and roofs. We also wrote with charcoal on the logs. It looked really nice, I liked that beach visit!

Saturday, October 15, 2011

When we went to D.C. a couple days ago, we went to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing (a.k.a. The Money Factory). The Bureau of Engraving and Printing is the place where they make 1, 5, 10, 20, and 100 dollar bills. When we first walked in to the Money Factory there was a million dollars in 10 dollar bills! On the tour we took, we learned that they redeem old torn or damaged money. They redeem about $30 million every year! They also change the design of the bill every 7-10 years to help prevent counterfeiting. When we were watching the people make money, an employee tried to hand me a wad of money to me through the glass. I tried to grab it but the glass was in the way. Then he held up sign that said $400,000 on it and pointed to the wad of money he tried to hand me. After that he held up a sign that said "free samples" everyone got excited and he turned it around and it said "yesterday". There was also another sign that said "I just printed the equivalent of my life's salary in a couple seconds!". It was super fascinating watching them make money, I really enjoyed all the tricks and techniques they made the money with. One example is that they use a watermark. A watermark is a picture embedded in the paper, only see-able when you hold it up to the light. You can't scan or copy watermark so it helps prevent counterfeiting. Also they use color-shifting inks. Look at a dollar bill and move it around. The ink is green now it's black and its green again! If you want to learn more about $ go to their site http://www.moneyfactory.gov. We also went to the Annapolis Sailboat Show. At the boat show some companies gave out key chains and at the gate we were challenged to get as many as we could. The recorded was 19 key chains and we just beat it with 20.

Monday, October 10, 2011

We went to the super-busy-compared-to-Maine, NYC. There was a place that had really good build-your-own-burgers. I had lettuce, carrots and pickles on mine. Then we took a stroll to see the big screen in Times Square. We saw a guy that was shirtless and doing exercises with a stretchy rope on the fence of a subway station. Weird, usually you see people doing that in a gym, not in a subway station. When we were done sight seeing we took a train back to Port Washington. While we were on the train we saw the Mets stadium and the place were they hold the US Open. I liked how you could walk everywhere in a city and I especially like New York City because of the signs that light up bright in the evening sky and turned and moved every which way. I enjoyed watching all the different cultures and all different fashions. It was SUPER awesome!!!!!!

MITseaAH, (mitt-see-ahhhhh) the mega sailboat yacht that we docked next to in Port Washington was enormous! It had a swimming pool and hot tub on the bow, a retractable mast, a hydraulic center board and air conditioning. It's cockpit was larger than our boat and it's spinnaker pole was taller than our mast. To top it off they had a crew of 7 including a chef and an engineer on board. It had a stern thruster and a bow thruster. It went 25 knots and it could plane! They used 250 gallons of fuel and hour, while we use only 1 gallon an hour. I won't even get into how much water they use, all I am going to say is that we use 4 gallons a day and they use much, much more.

Remi wanted to write a little bit in a blog, so here is her perspective of New York City.

"There was man in New York city that was siting on the sidewalk
That was holding his shirt . And had one Shoe on and a big truck
Was behind him and a puddle was under the big truck then he started
To drink out of it . It was busy In NYC. We whet on a train it was fun . It was dirty at the train station. We heard a lot of different languages . people were protesting . It was loud ."

Remi and I relaxing next to the big screen in Times Square

I am spacing out in a restaurant.

MITseaAH's fore deck (MITseaAH was so big that we could not fit it in one picture)